


The Heat of A Thousand Young Stars

by nayanroo



Series: Luminous Beings [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Everyone is a bad Jedi, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:26:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nayanroo/pseuds/nayanroo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sif has never asked what she feels like in the Force, but she knows each one of her friends by heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heat of A Thousand Young Stars

**Author's Note:**

> This is in the same continuity as Mosso. Both are standalone works.

There are certain places Sif has learned to look to find her friends. She doesn’t have Jane’s talents at pattern recognition; her knowledge is all based on habit and pure tenacity when searching out someone. Thor and the three Knights who are practically brothers – Fandral the Corellian, Hogun and Volstagg from Commenor – tend to be in the sparring chambers, honing their considerable skills at weaponry (though Hogun has some talent in the Force gifts of healing, so he is occasionally in the medcenter learning those arts). Jane, the young Master from Naboo, is either tinkering with some weaponry in a workroom or in the Archives.

More often, though, she finds the last of their merry band there in the Archives, his head bent over something on his datapad or the terminal before him… and of late, he has been often in the Holocron vault. Having attained the rank of Master not three months ago, Loki has wasted no time whatsoever in throwing himself fully into the mysteries contained therein. Sif knows, from her own Master, that there is much knowledge contained in the glowing cubes of the Order’s Holocrons – knowledge that does not come from the Jedi alone. Some of it is dark and evil and she wonders why Loki would spend so much time there. He was ever the one to seek out knowledge, but she does not think that he would pursue it at all costs, even to the edge of the dark side. But it is there that her feet take her first, and as she pauses on the threshold with the heavy hem of her cloak swishing around her ankles, she reaches out to see if the presence she knows well to be Loki’s is within.

Sif has never asked what her own presence feels like, yet knows every one of her friends has a distinct flavor – Thor is bright and brassy and Jane like the tempered but brilliant glow of a lamp (though both burn brighter when they are together and everyone carefully avoids bringing this up), the three Knights a little dimmer but no less lustrous, her old Master an antique glow. But Loki is like looking at a nebula, with so many young stars shining through the gases that the light diffuses through the molecules and all is aglow. It is a darker, less flashy light, but it is stronger, and when she feels that heat and brilliance wash over her she starts forward again.

He is at one of the terminals today, the sharp planes of his face lit harshly by the glow of the screen. Loki does not look much like an Alderaanian, not like Thor and Sif do. She walks over and sits at the terminal beside him. It comes to life in response to her presence but she ignores the query screen.  
“When were you going to tell me you returned?” she asks. He glances over.

“Hello, Sif,” he replies. “I’ve returned.”

“Don’t be rude. We were all worried about you.” _I was worried about you_ , she thinks, but keeps that to herself. Jedi are not supposed to form attachments, but since the day in youngling training when Kellan knocked her down and said she’d never be any good at a lightstaff Sif has never let the words _supposed to_ get in her way.

Loki looks back at the screen (he’s switched it to something else entirely now) and she can see the muscles in his jaws bunch once – a drawing on the Force, like the sea pulling back before a big wave – and then he is calm again, that surface coat of nonchalance and perfect Jedi bearing back in place. “My apologies,” he says, and the insincerity of the words twist in Sif’s gut. “It was not my intention.”

That part at least, she thinks, was true.

*

She doesn’t remember the name of the planet they’re on, or how long ago it was they landed, or even where their rendezvous point is anymore. The fighting is thick and the blaster bolts fly around her. The blades at both ends of her lightsaber fly around her too, a whirling golden shield. She blocks the ones that are a danger to her or those too close to her, and lets through those ones that fly harmlessly past.

Some Jedi have great talent at healing; others are gifted with things like Battle Meditation or mastery of the uses relevant to diplomacy. Sif is a warrior, and while as a Jedi she seeks to prevent fighting and preserve life (that all-important source of her power) from the moment she laid hands on a training lightsaber she has known that the battlefield is where she’ll be supreme. Even Thor, whose power and strength has made him more than adept at the Djem So form, cannot stand before Sif. Juyo is her form, and perhaps she should not be so surprised anymore when Loki has his head bent over a Holocron because she walks the same dim paths herself, close to the darkness enough to touch it.

But it is the light parts of the Force she calls to for strength, the parts that glitter and glisten around her that she reaches out to and channels into her muscles, using them to wash away acid by-products and keep herself renewed, keep her golden shield flying. But Juyo is an offensive form, and so when she knows she can Sif bares her teeth and cries out with a primal voice, and charges forward into the horde. In the Force she can sense the others in her group following, and grins. If they die, let them die well and let their voices add to the singing of the Force in the veins of the living.

As the battle wears on it seems they _might_ die; they’ve become cut off from the rest of the attack group. She cannot even see Thor’s head towering above everything else nor hear his booming voice. One by one those who stand with her fall until she is left alone in a circle of opponents, her breathing ragged and even the channels of the Force feeling raw around the edges. She has called too much upon it to sustain her this day, she knows. If this went on much longer, she would fall, too.

 _Be careful_ , Master Heimdall had said in the drop ship on the way down.

 _I have no plans to die today_ , Thor had responded with a laugh. There had been a flicker of sadness in her old Master’s golden eyes at that, a twist of his lips that seemed brought by nostalgia.

 _None do_ , he had said. _Remember you are Jedi. Remember that you serve the Force,_ he’d continued on, and then they’d hit atmosphere and the turbulence had knocked her shoulder against Loki’s, and then she had been lost in the anticipation of the fight ahead. Anything else Heimdall had spoken had faded away, as the sounds of the fighting around her were fading away. Her focus came down to the circle of her enemies.

Sif raised her lightsaber in a salute. And then they converged upon her.

She fights well for a long time, or maybe it only seems like a long time. Parry, thrust, parry, sweep her blade around – the stink of burned flesh and a cry of pain – parry again. Sif reaches into that part of her that has all the things she puts away – regret, anger, emotional hurt – and unleashes it along with a flurry of attacks. She can feel her emotions fueling her movements.

It’s not enough. One of her opponents knocks the backs of her calves with their vibrosword and she’s lucky it doesn’t slice through the armor she’s wearing but the shock of it is enough to send her down to a knee. Her danger sense prickles and she feels the phantom slide of the knife between her ribs to her heart a moment before it happens—

But it never does, because suddenly there is that brilliance behind her, the heat of a thousand new-formed stars, and Loki is spreading his hands out wide to throw all the oncoming fighters back on a concussive wave of raw Force power. The gases of the nebula stir and roil angrily. Loki is angry, but so is Sif, and when she gets up they go back-to-back, their lightsabers flashing gold and green before them and all around them.

He ducks, and she slices above his head; she drops to the ground to cut the legs from under an oncoming attacker and Loki _pushes_ above her head, throwing the now-legless thing back into a cluster of its fellows. They are matched, they fight as one, and when she reaches out to him in the Force they _become_ one. It’s disorienting, because for a moment she can see herself through Loki’s eyes, as she knows he is seeing himself through hers – a tall, thin, dark-haired man, the blood spattered across his black-and-green tunic and pants just as dark except where it’s on his skin and then it’s almost too red. For a moment Sif can feel him contemplating throwing up walls and pushing her out of his mind.

But he doesn’t.

Sif smiles at him.

And then they’re fighting again but this time their movements are even more in sync, their minds and bodies moving as though they’re one being in two bodies. Sif can feel that heat flowing through her veins and beating just behind her heart and it’s almost too much along with the heat of battle but she has Loki at her back to cool her, to siphon off the heat before it consumes her. She is burning, but Loki is like water over a blaze. He is a renewal of energy. He is an anchor in her whirling storm of the passion of Juyo.

Suddenly cannon fire from above sweeps the field around them, and Sif blinks and looks up. Her vision is double for a moment – Loki is looking up, too – but then it refocuses and she sees the gunship descending on repulsors. Hogun is at the open door, gesturing to them. Loki grabs her wrist and makes the leap up on the Force. She is glad for it. Drawing on the Force to do so much as ease the pain from her injuries is almost too much. It burns, as she burns.

Loki does not let go of her wrist until he sees her ensconced beside the very basic medical suite the gunship has. It rattles as they rise up away from the battle. Sif feels empty, not just because she has spent herself so thoroughly but because that place where Loki was in her mind is now without him. Her hazel eyes watch as he attaches her to the suite. His hands shake ever so slightly… or is that the ship rising through the atmosphere? She doesn’t think so.

“Thank you,” she murmurs. He starts, looks at her with eyes that are too green.

“It was nothing,” he replies. If he says more, she doesn’t hear it. She is asleep.

*

Sif only has the vaguest memory of being moved to the medbay on the cruiser they’re taken to. She tries once, to reach out in the Force and ensure her friends are all still alive and for a moment senses Thor and Jane close by, but the effort of it is too much. Long, cool fingers brush her hair back from her cheeks and a soft voice tells her to be still and let the droids work on her, that there is shrapnel and dirt and stars know what else embedded in her skin and she must let them work. For a moment Sif reaches out one more time in the Force despite the pain, touching Loki’s presence, and is saddened to feel it draw back.

She awakens in a bacta tank, an Emdee droid sweeping back and forth along a row of them. She is back in the Temple, though she has no knowledge of when she arrived. It doesn’t matter; as she takes stock of herself, probing tendrils of Force along her limbs, she knows she is healed, if sore.

“Where is Master Loki?” she asks, as she dresses in the dark brown tunic and sand-colored pants that make her wardrobe.

“Know, I do not,” the Padawan helping her replies. He holds out her lightsaber in a three-fingered hand. “Sorry I am, Knight.”

“That’s all right,” she murmurs, and shrugs into her robe before taking up her lightsaber. Its surface is scratched from a hundred encounters. She’ll have to care for it when she gets back to her quarters; laziness in maintaining her weapon is something her Master did not allow. If she neglects it and it fails her it would be her own fault.

She wonders if Loki’s response to her probe before is her fault, too, then shrugs. If he is here and it is the will of the Force, she will find him. Sif does not usually leave things as such, but Loki, she senses, must be handled differently.

On the way out of the medbay she runs into Thor who is heading in. He looks drawn, and tells her quietly that Jane was grievously hurt when she put herself between him and an energy grenade. There is pride there too, though.

“She fought on even after that,” he says. “She fought with a piece of shrapnel two inches across buried in her side because she knew we needed her to.”  
“Jane is brave,” Sif replies. “She stands with her friends when they need her.”

“As do you. As does Loki.” Thor eyes her, and then his face splits in a weary smile. “I passed him, in one of the east hallways beneath the Spire of Tranquility. He did not seem very tranquil.”

“He wouldn’t,” Sif mutters, and bows to her friend. Will of the Force, indeed. “Thank you, Thor.”

She can feel Loki now and follows it until she finds him, seated on a bench looking out through the open promenade of this hall. Coruscant bustles around them, but inside the Temple it is calm. Or at least it should be; when Sif puts her fingertips on his shoulder she can sense the whirling confusion in Loki. Stubbornly she sits beside him.

“That was interesting,” she says.

“If you insist.”

Sif glares at him at first, then, as the minutes pass, she softens a bit. Loki does not let anyone in; to be so closely joined to one person must have been… frightening? Is that it? It must be, because there is the slight ring of _rightness_ to it. As she thinks back, she realizes that wasn’t just it.  
“We were in each other’s heads,” she says at last. “We could see what the other saw… feel what the other felt.” She remembers focus, and… fear. Not just at opening himself to her, but _for_ her. A flash of the sight of herself through his eyes, bleeding from a dozen places he can see and some that he can’t, eyes too bright in a pale face. “That’s it, isn’t it?” He looks away, and Sif knows she’s hit it, there. “You’re afraid of what I felt.”

He doesn’t answer. But then again, he doesn’t have to. By now Sif realizes she can interpret so many of his subtle cues.

“You don’t have to be,” she says. “Fear is a path to the dark side. I’m not going anywhere, least of all there.”

The words are out of her mouth before she can call them back, but she realizes they needed to be said. He looks over at her suddenly, sharply, and his gaze doesn’t leave this time.

“We do make a good team, I suppose,” he says at last.

One of the exercises she was given as a student, when their band of seven was just being formed and before she became a Padawan, was one to sharpen the mind; each one of them was given a passage. A question, or a small phrase from some long-dead Jedi. They were told to meditate on it, and return with its meaning to the next lesson. Sif always struggled with these; she was a warrior even then, and her mind was not given easily to riddles and puzzles. Each time this sort of thing was set to them, Sif would mull over it until her mind felt fit to burst, but the answer never came easily as it came to Loki, to Jane – even to Hogun. Thor struggled too, though sometimes through his own simple ways he found the answers. Sif was frustrated constantly, though… but she thinks that Loki is one riddle she will enjoy finding the answers to. Everything he says has layers of meaning, and what he says is not always what he is thinking. That little place in her mind where he had been on the battlefield begins to fill a bit, and Sif senses its warmth flooding through her.

Her eyes flicker a moment, and it seems she can see wisps of gaseous clouds before them in between seconds. Then she smiles, and they are gone, burned away.


End file.
